Tag Archives: GPL

Ma.tt: not a robot

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Even after working for Matt Mullenweg for over four years now (my longest job!), it still totally pumps me up how forward thinking, thoughtful, and human Matt is.

From the ThemeShaper article “Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory“:

“…it became obvious to me that we had to figure out the GPL issues first so introducing a WP.com marketplace wouldn’t inadvertently harm the WordPress community by sucking the air out of .org theme development, so I held off the revenue and success we knew this would bring to work out the GPL issues out with the community.

…

But very explicitly this is an experiment. We’re not psychic and there are many open questions: Will anyone buy these things? How will the private forums work for support, both for our users and partners? How long does it take us to review and get a new theme online? What’s the most effective price ranges? How many themes and partners should we have? How do we promote the premium themes, while balancing adding new free ones? Will any of them ever be more popular than the Smoothie? (51,109 blogs and counting.)

Go read the full article.

Could WordPress have a better BDFL?

WordPress Declaration of Independence

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The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

We hope to gather broad community support to make sure we can continue to serve the public good through freely accessible software.

About Web page, WordPress Foundation

There are already a lot of great comments on the welcome post “Getting off the ground“. Here is a one of the many juicy comments made by Matt in response to a question posted there:

Sure, as a quick summary: [Wordpress.com and the WordPress Foundation] completely separate, but share a similar name and my involvement. One is for-profit, the other non-profit. They both have similar goals in terms, but the Foundation can take a long-term multi-decade approach to solving these problems without regard for short term profit, market conditions, or shareholders. I’ve always had a vision for two simultaneous approaches to the WordPress way, the heart and the mind, but it’s just now coming together.

GPL Isn’t a Good License for Proprietary Software

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Yesterday, I wrote about the clarification regarding WordPress Themes and the GPL (v2). Daniel Jalkut, who I featured as a personal WordPress Hero earlier this year, wrote one of the most interesting responses to “[WordPress] Themes are GPL, too“. Written on Thursday and temporarily taken offline by the fireball, Daniel’s “Getting Pretty Lonely” article laments that WordPress is GPL, and that any open source software that uses a GPL license discourages developer community participation.

At first this article left me very upset, maybe because I found it quite persuasive, but then I reflected that for anyone developing and selling proprietary software, Daniel’s is the only position to believe in and promote.

Commercial WordPress Themes’s PHP Code is GPL 2 Too

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I’m hoping that my boss Matt Mullenweg sharing the legal opinion on “Themes are GPL, too” will put the issue to rest for the majority of the community (emphasis mime):

“PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
…
Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or JavaScript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.”

The legal opinion was provided by Software Freedom Law Center. Council James Vasile provided the findings and blogs at hackervisions.org . James also has posted about this on his own blog in the article “CMS Themes and the GPL“. As I commented there, my fear is:

“people read what they want to get out of it, and case law is the only thing that moves them.”

The legal finding and unchanged policy  are consistent with the intentions of the WordPress developer community and what has been promoted for the four years I’ve been involved.

Talking about licensing really is the suck. Matt’s article became necessary lately as some commercial theme developers have been very aggressive to WordPress community members, who have shared theme code as allowed by WordPress’s viral GPL v2 license.

It frustrates me when I read commercial theme developers complaining about people “stealing” their themes after the thousands of hours they have worked. They make no mention of the hundreds of thousands of hours others have worked on WordPress (counting on the  GPL protecting their freedoms ).

The incredibly exciting news is seeing the various commercially developed and supported themes embrace the GPL in the last 9 months. Theme collections like ThemeShaper (Thematic FrameWork), StudioPress (previously Revolution 2),  and WooThemes are all 100% GPL — those are just the ones I’m familar with, be sure to check out the theme offerings of the other commercially supported GPL themes.

Happy Birthday GNU!

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The GNU Project is 25 years young! And Richard Stallman and crew are working as hard as ever. Thank you!

The GNU Project is most famous for it’s versions of UNIX utilities and the GPL family of licenses. But whatever you think of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation‘s hard-line approaches and politics, everyone has benefited from their work. Every computerized device, if it doesn’t run GNU software, likely contains software that was influenced by the GNU project or software released under a GPL license. And the GNU Project’s influence extends beyond software to most areas where technology meets freedom.

Thanks again GNU!

Movable Type Pro, Setting Social Networking Free, Vaporware, WordPress, BuddyPress

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Six Apart VP Anil’s response today on the official Six Apart blog to my Movable Type Pro Introduction video parody doesn’t surprise me, but where is the link love?

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Open Source Free Web Site Templates without the Open Source

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http://www.OSWD.org/ – “Open Source Web Design” led by Francis J. Skettino. Free web design templates.

Unfortunately, I like open source in my open source.

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Licensing is the suck!

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As I recently wrote the obvious, “licensing is legal, and legal things are complex”. I should have wrote, licensing is the suck!

When ever I start thinking about licensing and it being the suck, I think to Lawrence Lessig‘s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

  • Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  • The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  • Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  • Ours is less and less a free society.

O’Reilly Network — Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002

I highly recommend reading, hearing, or viewing the whole talk about a lot more than licensing that Lessig has given more than 100 times. It speaks to why licensing is the suck and presents some of the largest issues facing civilization today.